A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF
ROSA PARKS (1913–2005)
Page 6
numerous cases with the NAACP, but we did not get the
publicity. There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder,
and rape. We didn't seem to have too many successes. It
was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that
be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to
continue being second-class citizens” (Academy of
Achievement, 2006).
© Bettmann/CORBIS
Rosa Parks became the “Mother of the Modern Day Civil
Rights Movement” when she transformed the nation on
December 1, 1955 by defying racist policies in defense of
her human right to dignity and equal treatment.
Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee,
Alabama on April 2, 1913. She was the granddaughter of
former slaves and the daughter of James McCauley, a
carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a rural schoolteacher.
Upon the separation of her parents at the age of two, she
moved to her maternal grandparents' farm in Pine Level,
Alabama with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester.
Rosa attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls,
a private school founded by several liberal women from
northern states. She then went on to a laboratory school
set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes
(now known as Alabama State University), but was forced
to drop out when her grandmother, and later her mother,
fell ill.
In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber, who
had long been active in the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While Rosa
worked with the organization's state president, Edgar
Daniel Nixon, to mobilize a voter registration drive in
Montgomery, Raymond Parks worked to help free the
defendants in the famous Scottsboro case, in which nine
young black men were accused of raping two white
women. An all-white jury convicted the nine boys and
sentenced eight of them to death, despite strong evidence
of their innocence. All of the Scottsboro boys eventually
gained their freedom, but the process took nearly twenty
years.
Rosa Parks recalled in an interview, “I worked on
By 1955, the segregated seating policies on public buses
had long been a source of resentment within the black
community. Black citizens were required to pay their fares
at the front of the bus only to re-board the bus through
the back door. Sometimes white bus drivers would drive
away before African-American passengers were able to reboard the bus. When a bus was crowded, typically during
peak travel hours, black people riding in the reserved
“colored” section in the back of the bus would be forced
to give up their seats to white people, or if there was no
standing room left, would be forced to leave the bus.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks took her seat in the
back of the bus, just behind the “whites-only” section.
When she and three other African-American bus riders
were told to relinquish their seats to white passengers,
Rosa Parks refused. The bus driver had Rosa arrested and
taken to police headquarters. She was released later that
night on $100 bond. Parks detailed her feelings at this
moment in her autobiography My Story:
“People always say that I didn't give up my
seat because I was tired, but that isn't true.
I was not tired physically, or no more tired
than I usually was at the end of a working
day. I was not old, although some people
have an image of me as being old then. I
was forty-two. No, the only tired I was,
was tired of giving in.”
The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been looking
for a case to challenge the legality of segregated bus
seating and decided to mount a protest in Rosa Parks’s
name. In addition, the Women's Political Council (WPC)
led by JoAnn Robinson, had the idea of a one-day bus
boycott and wanted to initiate the boycott in protest of
Rosa Parks’s arrest.
Within 24 hours, the WPC distributed more than 52,000
fliers asking Black Americans — who comprised 75
© 2006 Anti-Defamation League
A Brief Biography of Rosa Parks (1913–2005)
percent of Montgomery’s bus business — to boycott the
city buses on the day of Rosa Parks's trial. On December 5,
Montgomery buses went empty, and Rosa Parks was
convicted by the local court and ordered to pay a fine of
$14, which she refused to pay. What was planned as a
one-day bus boycott became a 381-day protest, during
which time 42,000 protesters walked, carpooled, or took
taxis instead of riding the segregated Montgomery buses.
Shortly thereafter, the newly appointed president of the
Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), Martin
Luther King, Jr. filed a case in a United States district
court on behalf of the organization to desegregate the
public buses in Montgomery. The district court ruled for
the plaintiffs, declaring segregated seating on buses
unconstitutional. When the case was taken to the
Supreme Court, the segregation of Montgomery public
buses was declared illegal, and on December 20, 1956,
the Montgomery buses were officially desegregated.
Due to constant harassment by white people following the
Supreme Court decision, and lack of employment, Rosa
Parks and her husband relocated to Detroit, Michigan in
1957. Mrs. Parks worked as a seamstress in Detroit until
1965 when U.S. Representative John Conyers (DMichigan) hired her to serve as an administrative assistant
in his Congressional office in Detroit. She held this
position until she retired in 1988.
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Ten years after the death of her husband in 1977, Mrs.
Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for
Self-Development which sponsors an annual summer
program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom. Select
youth groups tour the country in buses and learn about
the history of the civil rights movement and Underground
Railroad sites. In 1992, Rosa Parks published her
autobiography Rosa Parks: My Story for young people to
learn about her real life story.
Rosa Parks received numerous awards and tributes in her
lifetime, including the NAACP's highest honor, the
Spingarn Medal, in 1970, and the Martin Luther King, Jr.
Award in 1980. In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded
Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest
honor given to a civilian, and in 1999 the United States
Congress honored Rosa Parks with the Congressional Gold
Medal.
Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until her passing at the age
of 92 on October 24, 2005. On October 27, the United
States Senate passed a resolution to honor Rosa Parks by
allowing her remains to “lie in state” in the U.S. Capitol
Rotunda. Rosa Parks became the 31st person so honored,
and the first woman to ever lie in state in the Rotunda.
She was also the second black person, after Jacob J.
Chestnut, who was one of the two United States Capitol
Police officers fatally shot in 1998.
REFERENCES:
Academy of Achievement. (2006). Biography: Rosa Parks. Retrieved from Web: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/
page/par0bio-1. Last Revised November 2, 2005.
AfricanAmericans.com, http://www.africanamericans.com/RosaParks.htm
Africana Online, http://www.africanaonline.com/rosa_parks.htm
Africa Within, http://www.africawithin.com/bios/rosa_parks.htm
Parks, Rosa, and Jim Haskins. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Puffin, 1999.
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks
© 2006 Anti-Defamation League